"Farewell...
You can't decide which way the wind will blow"
The week that has gone by has left the always sad news of the departure of two veteran cartoonists who have had to leave the media for which they have been working for a good many years.
Friday 31 March. Andrรฉs Faro Lalanne (1965) publishes his last cartoon in the Diari de Tarragona, where he was in charge of the daily joke for a quarter of a century.
Even without knowing the details, the author made it very clear that it was not exactly an elegant farewell on the part of the newspaper.
"Twenty-five years of drawing for the Diari and of excellent relations with colleagues and directors ended with an undignified departure. Of course there have been no farewells or mentions... In the end, your cartoon may be the only review of this infamous farewell".
Andrรฉs thus replied to the farewell and good wishes cartoon dedicated to him by his colleague Napi.
"To Faro so that the wind takes you to a good port" / Napi's cartoon (3 April).
Andrรฉs Faro is not a cartoonist who does the bare minimum. He is one of those who works hard on his cartoons and you can tell that behind the battle cartoonist there is a great illustrator. Look through his pieces, he has many that are as beautiful as they are colourful.
Another colleague who last week left the medium in which he started drawing when he was still a teenager is Juan Carlos Contreras (Jaรฉn, 1963). His cartoons were published in the digital and print editions of the daily Jaรฉn, although not all of them were published on the newspaper's website.
On 27 March, he announced on Twitter his departure from the newspaper Jaรฉn, for which he began working when he was just 15 years old:
"By my own decision, today I close another stage in the newspaper Jaรฉn. Thank you for everything I have learned. But don't relax, I'll keep on giving you a good time with my cartoons (...)
Although Contreras prefers not to say much more about the matter for the moment, I know that it is also another of those painful departures. Juan Carlos has given the newspaper everything he could and more, as well as the occasional viral cartoon (which some media entrepreneurs are so fond of nowadays).
I never tire of repeating it. I don't like pitiful and defeatist speeches, but I don't know if it's that I don't find out when the media hire new cartoonists (I laugh when I write "hire") or it's that I only get references of when they do away with them in bad ways, sometimes even forcing them to leave with different and well-known trashy practices.
Even if they do it to you twenty times, nobody gets used to this. The sudden rupture of that necessary routine of periodicity of publication and of a certain economic stability (I'm laughing again) makes you question again and again whether it's worth continuing to dedicate oneself to this business.
At the end of the day, cartoons are not a commodity and if you don't do them, someone else will. The profession (at least as far as our links with the traditional media are concerned) is not changing, and if it does, it's for the worse, which is difficult enough.
why doesn't anyone want to be a cartoonist anymore? 23/07/2020
So, sweeping things under the carpet, I can only suggest that you support, whenever and however you can, those creators you like, who made you laugh or feel something, good or not so good at some point, because behind all the laughter and the old-fashioned romanticism that surrounds this profession crushed by precariousness, there are silences that hide realities that are not so funny.
